He doesn’t budge. My fingers bite into his arm, prodding him. He doesn’t respond, not with so much as a blink of a blind eye or the brace of a muscle. He simply stands there, unalterable as a rock.

I walk back and board the copter. The pilot is blond, boyish. I vaguely recognize his small neat features, the rakish cap, the high polished jodhpurs. He revs the engine with a look of devil-may-care languor meant to tell us that any activity not requiring an absolutely gruesome courage is in his lexicon a bore. As further proof he whistles nonchalantly between his teeth. The chopper trembles. The rotors are a shrieking blur somewhere above us.

Then Val stiffens. “Oh, Christ!” she says. She springs out of a bucket seat and twists the safety latch on the door.

“What the hell are you doing?” I yell.

“My father,” she cries. “I got to find him.”

“Your father’s dead,” Grady tells her.

She looks at him, stunned.

The copter lifts slowly, screaming as if in pain. It’s a few feet off the ground when one of the spectators, so passive until this moment, sprints to the side of the ship and grabs the radio antenna. Then the rest surge forward, clinging to the skids, dangling from the stabilizers.

The aircraft shudders and tips. The main rotor slices into the earth, smashing people into a bloody gruel. The tail boom guard skews, throwing us hard against a bulkhead. The aircraft flips over. The three of us in the cabin slam against what had been the overhead and is now the deck. The shaft of the rotor snarls, breaks jaggedly from its mooring. It twists and spins through the fuselage and like the giant bore of a rotary drill plunges into the pilot, eviscerating him, brains and bowels, as suffocating smoke engulfs the cabin. A little white finger of fire points to a break in the fuel line. We throw ourselves out of the copter as it becomes an orange and scarlet fireball.

We run until we are numb with exhaustion. Then we walk and stumble until we fall to the desert floor. I don’t know how far we’ve come, but when the helicopter explodes it sounds a long way off, even as it fuses with the untempered catastrophe that surrounds it.

We lie back in the ocean of sand, walled in by a thick and pondrous outcrop of rocks that make it impossible to tell if the wind has changed.

“How did my father die?” Valerie asks.

“Do me a favor,” Grady says breathlessly, “save your questions for later.” He drags himself to his feet. So do Val and I. Grady uses abbreviated gestures to point out the dictates of his compass.

We cross the mountains not a hundred yards from the cave, our cave, Val’s and mine. We go on. The shadows amplify. Darkness falls as suddenly as a meteor.